Like all atheists, Richard Dawkins can spend all day every day in his Darwinian comfort zone dismissing the idea that God created humans. But he gets much more uncomfortable having to confront the reality that, for all his efforts, humans keep on creating gods - even in the 21st century. The problem that just baffles him, as he told a packed session at the Hay festival on Sunday, is faith. Dawkins doesn't, can't and won't do faith. A lot of other scientists find ways to live and let live with religious people. Quite a lot of scientists are even religious themselves. But, as Dawkins said, he just isn't one of them.

This refusal to compromise is heroic, of course. It makes for terrific copy. Dawkins's book, The God Delusion, has sold nearly a million hardback copies. As Rosie Boycott points out, that makes him the Harry Potter of non-fiction (Dawkins frowned at that comparison - scientists don't do magic either). But if Dawkins is the best thing that has happened to atheism in a long time, paradoxically, he is also one of the best things that has happened to religion, too. Fundamentalists on both sides love him.

Dawkins has no comprehension at all of the wishy-washy middle ground - and there was a lot of that in rain-drenched Hay. Someone asked him what he thought about Rowan Williams. The liberal and decent archbishop of Canterbury is a pretty clever chap, after all, and on everything other than God, he and Dawkins probably see eye-to-eye.

"What worries me about nice archbishops is that they make the world safe for the extremists," Dawkins responded. "They have taught us that faith is a virtue." A virtue, unfortunately, that allows mad people to justify flying planes into buildings in the name of Allah.

Dawkins is brilliant at exposing the irrationality and danger of religious faith. But he cannot engage with the millions who just feel better with some sort of confused belief than with nothing at all. As an atheist myself, I agree with everything Dawkins says about God and faith. But he hasn't a clue about what David Brooks, in a recent New York Times column, calls the "quasi-religious" people who make up perhaps the majority of societies like this. He just doesn't get what makes people tick.

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